Chapter 55 The Ghost of Room 203 Begins Cleaning Room 203...
When Zhou Fangdong returned to the second floor of the apartment, the five cleaners were no longer in the corridor.
The fragments of the Ganoderma lucidum had all been neatly stacked and piled up in the corner.
The bloodstains, dust, and other stains on the floor and walls had all disappeared. Both the hallways and the corridors where the tenants' rooms were located were cleaned very thoroughly.
Zhou Fangdong also noticed that the ghosts wandering in the second-floor corridor had become much quieter. Although there were still fights, it was much better than the initial bloody battles that resembled a gladiatorial arena.
Sure enough, the instability of the Yin energy on the second floor was largely due to the mutated fleshy Ganoderma. After the fleshy Ganoderma disappeared, as more rooms on the second floor were rented out, the Yin energy in the corridor should become the same as on the first floor.
Zhou Fangdong entered room 201.
The sick ghost remained huddled inside the medicine jar and did not emerge. Zhou Fangdong walked to the largest living room and took out the cloth bag that the furniture vendor had given him.
As he untied the bag and poured it out, miniature pieces of furniture fell out one by one.
The furniture quickly returned to its normal size after being placed on the ground, and they were all stacked together.
The designs were indeed quite retro, but at a glance, there were no damaged or broken parts; they were all very sturdy—the furniture vendor was quite nice; the furniture he was given was indeed of good quality.
However, this furniture is a bit difficult to move.
Although Zhou Fangdong is now strong enough to easily move furniture, it would still be too time-consuming for him to move so much by himself, considering the weight of furniture for a two-bedroom, two-living room apartment.
After thinking for a moment, Zhou Fangdong walked to the kitchen stove and gently tapped the medicine pot: "Are you home? Come out and help me move some furniture."
A coughing sound rang out, and a figure emerged from the medicine pot, turning from an illusion into reality.
The sick ghost's expression remained melancholy. It lowered its head, its completely black eyes darting away from Zhou Fangdong, its expression a mixture of grievance and despair.
It was like an indentured laborer from the old days, without wages or freedom, hunched over, hands behind his back, sighing and coughing, slowly walking to the furniture.
The coughing grew more violent, and ghostly figures appeared in most of the furniture.
These foreign ghosts were quickly infected by the plague of the sick ghosts, and like controlled zombies, they numbly and mechanically placed the furniture in reasonable positions.
After the furniture was moved, these infected outsiders lined up and merged with the sick ghost one after another.
It takes time for a sick ghost to digest a ghost that breaks into the apartment corridor, but devouring the ghosts that come with the furniture is as easy as coughing.
After doing all this, the sick ghost cautiously raised his head and looked at Zhou Fangdong in the kitchen.
"Thank you for your hard work." Zhou Fangdong stepped aside, making way for the sick man to go home.
The sick ghost coughed and disappeared back into the medicine jar.
After checking each room again and confirming that each room was properly furnished, Zhou Fangdong sent a message to Duan Wenyu, asking him to tell Hong Zhong that room 201 was ready for occupancy and to let Hong Zhong select four team members as tenants of room 201.
After receiving Duan Wenyu's reply, Zhou Fangdong put away his phone and walked towards room 202.
However, it's not good to always trouble Duan Wenyu to relay messages. Let's find some time to modify Hong Zhong's phone as well, so that it will be easier to contact him.
When Zhou Fangdong arrived at the door of room 202, he was surprised to find that the door was not closed properly.
Zhou Fangdong quickly opened the rental page to check, and only went in after confirming that He Yansheng was still in the room.
The living room was right inside the door. As soon as Zhou Fangdong walked in, he heard a weak sigh.
"Sigh... Life really is a dream. Who could have imagined that, after all this time, we'd come full circle?" He Yansheng, lying on the sofa, reached out and looked at the bloodied and mangled ghostly figure, saying, "I'm probably already dead, otherwise how could I have returned to Liwan Apartments and seen you again?"
The ghost in room 202 was covered in bandages, almost all of which were stained red with blood. In some loose sections of the bandages, one could see the horrifying skin that looked as if it had been corroded by sulfuric acid.
Although its face was obscured, its crimson eyes, gazing at He Yansheng, were exceptionally gentle. Seeing him extend his hand, the ghost obediently offered its own bloodied hand.
The ghost had no physical form. Although he only touched a phantom, He Yansheng's pale face revealed a very satisfied and peaceful smile. "Holding your hand like this, I've only ever done it in my dreams before."
He Yansheng pulled back slightly, and the bandaged ghost seemed to be really pulled by him, and actually lay down in his arms.
The human and the ghost lay quietly embracing on the sofa, their blissful and sweet atmosphere completely inaccessible to outsiders.
Zhou Fangdong hadn't even closed the rental interface yet. Looking at the pixelated figures and ghostly figures surrounded by pink bubbles and pink flowers on the system interface, he felt that his appearance was somewhat inappropriate.
"Ahem." Zhou Fangdong coughed lightly. Although it wasn't appropriate to disturb him now, he had to hand over the key to room 202 to He Yansheng.
He Yansheng sighed heavily, "Sigh... Is the time up? Lord Ghost Messenger, could you allow me to spend a little more time with my wife?"
He had actually noticed Zhou Fangdong coming in a while ago, but thinking he could stall for time, he pretended not to see anything.
“I’m not a ghost messenger, I’m the landlord of Liwan Apartments. You’re still alive, and you’re a tenant now,” Zhou Fangdong explained succinctly. “This is room 202. Remember to keep the key with you at all times. Losing the key will automatically terminate your lease.”
After handing him the key to room 202, Zhou Fangdong went over the precautions for going up and down the stairs again: "Room 104 on the first floor is a convenience store. You can get food there if you need it, and you don't have to pay. You've lived in Liwan Apartments before, so you should know where room 104 is, right?"
He Yansheng nodded, his voice weak and listless: "I know, is the apartment rented out again now? That's good..."
He didn't care at all why the apartment was being re-rented or how the landlord had appeared; all he wanted to do now was lie there and be with his wife.
Seeing that He Yansheng had absolutely no desire to talk, Zhou Fangdong didn't bother him any longer and left the room directly.
I never expected that the ghost in room 202 was He Yansheng's wife... In that case, there's no need to worry about He Yansheng accidentally triggering the ghost's killing conditions.
To be honest, judging from He Yansheng's appearance, he would probably be willing to die even if his wife wanted to kill him.
Recalling He Yansheng's description, and then recalling the note he found under the cabinet in the mahjong room—'Wanting his wife to come back to life, he prayed to the medicine pot to bestow upon him the medicine to revive the dead.'
The person mentioned on the note who wanted to bring his wife back to life must be He Yansheng.
Zhou Fangdong sighed softly.
In the end, this so-called resurrection was probably just a scam by the Bone Inheritance Society.
Perhaps drinking that medicine that brings the dead back to life will indeed revive them, but what they will be reborn from is uncertain.
In a sense, He Yansheng was also one of the reasons for the death of the sick ghost in Room 201.
Fortunately, the ghosts in the room don't leave easily, and the sick ghost doesn't know the connection between the two medicine jars. Otherwise, if the two victims of the medicine jars were brought together, who knows what might have happened.
Zhou Fangdong arrived at the door of room 203 and pushed it open.
A wave of damp, musty air hit you as soon as you entered.
Room 203 is also a large family room, with the same layout as Rooms 201 and 202. However, the decoration style is very retro, with a feeling of the 1980s, exactly the same as the style of the staff and family housing of state-owned factories.
The room was too damp, like the windows hadn't been closed during the humid season, with water droplets all over the ceiling and walls.
The water droplets on the ceiling were dense in some places and not at all in others, outlining human figures, like white lines drawn around a corpse at a crime scene.
Soaked in moisture, large areas of the interior wall paint bulged and peeled off.
The peeling paint and mold on the wall pieced together to form human faces.
The faces all appeared to be male, likely three different people, and their expressions were all contorted with rage and arguing.
While Zhou Fangdong was observing the environment of room 203, a side quest for renting the room popped up:
Side Quest 9: Clean and rent out Room 203
① Clean the room and tidy up the house.
② Discard the damaged furniture and buy new furniture.
③ Find the ghost hidden in the room and figure out the ghost's killing pattern.
④ Draft a rental agreement and find tenant x to move in.
Side Quest Rewards: 500 Ghost Coins, 2000 Experience Points, 1 Random Skill Point
With the experience gained, Zhou Fangdong immediately activated [Ghost Eye] after closing the task panel and began searching for ghosts in the room based on the traces of yin energy flow.
The moldy face on the wall... no.
The human-shaped water stain on the ceiling... well, not exactly.
Where else can I detect unusual or supernatural disturbances?
Zhou Fangdong narrowed his eyes slightly, carefully examining every corner of the room.
Something's off about the bathroom; it's too clean. The whole house feels chaotic and eerie, but the bathroom is unusually stable—it's like they're trying too hard to hide something.
Zhou Fangdong went into the restroom.
Based on his experience watching horror movies, the first thing he did when he entered the bathroom was to turn on the tap.
The imagined scene of blood gushing from the tap or long hair flowing out did not occur; instead, normal, clear water flowed out.
Zhou Fangdong tightened the faucet again and began to observe the condition of the bathroom.
The bathroom's decor is just as retro as the exterior. There's no separate wet and dry area; next to the toilet is an old-fashioned bathtub—the kind that requires you to curl up and sit in, and it's quite deep.
If the bathtub is slippery, it will probably be difficult to stand up.
...Could the ghost in this room have died in this bathtub?
Thinking this, Zhou Fangdong peered into the bathtub.
The bathtub was covered in moss, and like the mold on the outside wall, the moss was shaped like human faces.
But we still didn't see a ghost.
...It felt like playing hide-and-seek with the ghosts in this room.
After upgrading your skills, mind reading and searching for clues become much easier, but finding ghosts becomes much harder.
The upgraded skills, [Soul Absorption] and [Ghost Eye], come with a powerful deterrent buff, and with the added deterrent bonus from [Landlord's Key]... this has resulted in the ghosts in each room now avoiding him and not coming out on their own.
Zhou Fangdong sighed, put down the bathtub plug, and was about to get up when he suddenly felt something was wrong.
There was a shower head above the bathtub, and the metal hose of the shower head was tucked into the gap between the bathtub and the wall.
But isn't this metal hose a bit too long?
Zhou Fangdong narrowed his eyes and pulled the metal hose of the showerhead outwards.
He pulled a ghost out of the bathtub through the gap, like pulling a radish, by the metal hose. As he dragged the ghost out, its bloated body twitched a few times with surprising elasticity.
The ghost in room 203 is male. Although its wet appearance and bubbly body make it look like a water ghost, its cause of death should not be drowning, but rather the metal hose wrapped around its neck.
Unlike its pale, swollen body, its face, though also swollen, was a purplish-black color, as if blood was trapped in its head and circulation was impaired. Coupled with the gruesome strangulation mark on its neck… it was very likely strangled by the showerhead's metal hose.
Zhou Fangdong didn't continue guessing and directly used [Soul Absorption] on the ghost.
After casually stealing five hundred ghost coins, Zhou Fangdong was presented with the ghost's past life experiences.
This ghost was once a tenant of room 203, living there with his father, Liu Jianping, and his younger brother. The family of three moved into the Liwan Apartment shortly after its completion, making them among the earliest tenants of the apartment complex.
His mother died of illness at an early age, and his father, Liu Jianping, was a laid-off worker from a state-owned factory. After being laid off, he set up a stall selling barbecue skewers at Liwan Apartment.
He and his younger brother are not related by blood. His brother was the orphan of his father's coworker and was adopted by Liu Jianping when he was ten years old.
The younger brother's biological parents worked in the same workshop as Liu Jianping. When the machines in the workshop malfunctioned, they managed to push their father away in time. Liu Jianping survived, but his younger brother became an orphan.
Because it was the younger brother's parents' own operational error that caused the machine to malfunction and result in significant losses for the factory, the factory only compensated their family with a small amount of money. Seeing that there was no profit to be made, no one from the younger brother's parents' side wanted to take on this "hot potato," so Liu Jianping took his brother back to raise him.
Because of the life-saving grace, after his younger brother was brought into the house, Liu Jianping gave him all the good things in the house first, while neglecting his own biological son.
Although the older brother didn't say anything, he harbored resentment towards his younger brother for a long time.
The conflict erupted completely when both brothers reached marriageable age.
Because their family wasn't well-off, and both brothers only had associate degrees, they didn't move out after graduation and continued to live with their father in the Liwan Apartment.
The older brother works as a plumber, while the younger brother chooses to sell barbecue skewers with Liu Jianping.
Although he was supposed to be helping sell kebabs, the younger brother was spoiled for a long time and couldn't endure hardship. He claimed to be helping his father, but in reality, he was just loafing around and wandering around the market every day.
Although Liu Jianping saw everything, he never said anything about his younger brother.
Later, my brother started dating a girlfriend, and the two fell in love freely. When it came time to discuss marriage, according to their local custom, the groom's family was responsible for paying for the wedding and banquet expenses. However, even for the most modest banquet, my brother's savings couldn't cover the entire cost. So, he asked his father to help him pay some of the money, and he planned to repay his father with the wedding gifts he received after the wedding.
But to his surprise, after he told Liu Jianping about it, Liu Jianping just kept smoking silently, neither saying whether he would help nor not.
Just then, the younger brother returned and immediately demanded that his father give him another 200,000 yuan.
When confronting his younger brother, the older brother learned that Liu Jianping had emptied all the family's savings and even sold their recently purchased food truck, giving all the money to his younger brother.
My younger brother went on a blind date a couple of days ago and fell for a girl, but he has no education, isn't good-looking, and has a terrible personality—he's basically a giant baby. If he wants to get married, the only thing we can do is focus on the bride price.
Even though the younger brother emptied the family's savings, the girl still didn't like him. Unwilling to accept this, the younger brother started to obsess over it, thinking that it must be because he hadn't given enough money, so he rushed home and demanded that Liu Jianping give him more money.
After learning that their father had given all the family's money to his younger brother, the two brothers had the most intense argument of their lives, which ended in a bitter falling out.
A few days later, the older brother still couldn't swallow his anger, so he secretly changed the plumbing and electrical work in the bathroom while his father was away.
My younger brother had a habit of taking baths. That night, while taking a bath, he died in the bathtub because the water heater was leaking electricity.
Seeing his younger brother's dead state, the older brother felt no regret, only relief.
However, just as he was about to clean up the traces he had left in the bathroom, his father, who had said he was going to a gathering with his coworkers in the next city, suddenly returned home.
Upon seeing the horrific scene in the bathroom, Liu Jianping was so enraged that his high blood pressure flared up. Adding to his woes, the bathroom floor was still wet, and he slipped and collapsed, hitting his head hard on the tiles, instantly losing consciousness.
The older brother initially thought he felt nothing, but when he dragged his younger brother's body out of the bathtub and looked at the two corpses lying side by side on the bathroom floor, he finally realized what he had done.
Although he harbored resentment towards his father for his favoritism, the older brother never intended to kill him.
After realizing he had done something irreversible, overwhelming remorse completely broke the brother's spirit.
He wrapped the shower hose around his neck, knelt in the empty bathtub, kept kneeling with his head down, and strangled himself to death with the shower hose.
Even after death, he couldn't escape this obsession with regret and became a ghost, remaining in room 203.
After reading about the ghost's past life in Room 203, Zhou Fangdong had some doubts.
If the ghost in room 203 committed suicide, what were its conditions for killing?
And he didn't know if it was just his imagination, but he felt that this ghost was very weak—how did it manage to take over this room from those brutal ghosts in the second-floor corridor? Did it really have the ability to drive away outside ghosts?
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